Airplane!

Synopsis

At the risk of being highly subjective, this 1980 movie rocks! The
basic premise of the film is to spoof airlinedisastermovies so prevalent towards the latter half
of the 1970s. As is often the case in Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker films, the movie is an endless stream of
cheap gags that keep you rolling on the floor for 90 minutes. See also the Naked Gun and Police Squad movies.

The plot revolves around young Ted Striker (Robert Hays), a Vietnamveteran struggling
to pull his life back together and get back his girl, Elaine Dickinson (Julie Hagerty). To do this,
he overcomes his fear of flying and hops aboard a plane on which she is a flight attendant. She is reluctant
to say the least. Fortunately fate decides to intervene, and the entire cockpit crew and several of the
passengers fell poisoned by tainted airline seafood. If untreated, the stricken will die and the plane will crash.
Fortunately there is another pilot aboard, Ted Striker!

Before Striker can save the day, though, he has to exorcise the demons of his past — the botched mission
in Vietnam that cost him his crew and his sanity, the drinking problem, the disco dancing. With the support of
Elaine, Doctor Rumack (Leslie Nielsen), an inflatable autopilot, and Captain Rex Kramer (Robert Stack) on
the ground, Striker eventually gains the confidence he needs to land the plane safely.

In my effort to write this up as straight as possible, I have neglected to mention the endless sight gags, cheap puns,
and other jokes that come at you every three seconds. There is no way to list them all without noding the script, and
that would be a bad idea. Suffice it to say, although the overall sense of humor in the film is pretty juvenile, almost
anyone will find reason to laugh his or her butts off. Rent the movie. If you
really want to get into the lyricism of the movie, you can find
the script at http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~rkogan/humor/airplane.html.